All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 27, 2025 - Triggered - Donald Trump Jr
48:33
Peter Navarro Went to Prison So You Won't Have to | TRIGGERED Ep,286
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey guys, welcome to another huge episode of Triggered.
Today we'll have a familiar face back with us, Peter Navarro.
Peter is serving in my father's White House and even went to prison for standing up against the corrupt January 6th committee.
So you guys, make sure that you're liking, sharing, subscribing so you never miss one of these major episodes so we can get it out there.
Remember, if you miss the show here on Rumble, you can head over to Apple.
You can head over to Spotified Podcasts.
If your friends get their podcast that way, share it with them.
Subscribe anyway, even if you're a regular watcher here.
Okay.
Like, share, subscribe, check us out on Apple, Spotify.
Just do it.
For all of the top headlines that we cover here on the show, go over to my news app, MXM News, like minute by minute, MXM, where you get the mainstream news without the mainstream bias.
And of course, be sure to check out our incredible sponsors, people who have the guts to support this program.
And let's be clear, guys, cryptocurrency is no longer emerging.
It's here.
And a big move is cementing that reality in a major way.
Trump Media, you know, True Social, just inked a massive $6.4 billion deal with Yorkwill Acquisition Corp and crypto.com.
They're teaming up to acquire $6.4 billion in the powerhouse tokens CRO to establish America's first CRO treasury.
CRO fuels fast, low-fee, DeFi, staking rewards, and real-tworld perks like cashback on your spend.
When it's done, this new company will be the biggest publicly traded CRO holder out there.
If you want to learn how you can be part of it, head over to crypto.com today.
For more information on the proposed business combination, check out Yorkwill Acquisitions Corp's public filings.
But again, check out crypto.com today.
And also, guys, don't forget about the Birch Gold Group, where you can diversify your savings and protect your future.
The Trump administration is moving fast to right all of the left's wrongs.
But with all the damage we've seen the Democrats do, it's always smart to be prepared.
And that's why thousands of Americans are buying gold now from the Birch Gold Group.
Here are the facts.
In the past 12 months, the value of gold has increased by 30%.
And Birch Gold makes it extremely easy to convert an existing IRA or 401k into a tax-sheltered IRA in physical gold.
Or you can even buy some gold to store in your home safe.
Just text my name, Don Jr.
D-O-N-J-R, to the number 989898, and Birch Gold will send you a free info kit on gold.
There's no obligation, only useful information.
It's about learning more and educating yourself.
With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau and tens of thousands of happy customers take control of protecting your savings today.
Again, text my name, Don Jr., D-O-N-J-R, to the number 989898.
Joining me now, the author of I Went to Prison So You Won't Have To, White House Senior Counselor for Trade, Peter Navarro.
Peter, good to have you back, buddy.
Hey man, it's just so good to be with you.
I want to show your folks this.
It's me and my sweetheart on the stage of the Republican National Convention July 17th, 120 days after prison.
And it's like literally the night of the day I get out.
Don, I didn't know what was going to happen that night.
I had no idea whether people even knew who I was at the time, but the reception, which is so heartwarming to me.
And I think the lesson of my case basically that was brought to the American people is, hey, those Democrats, they are weaponizing our justice system.
They're doing everything possible to put people like Navarro Bannon in prison, trying to put your dad in prison for 700 years.
Me too, by the way.
Me too.
Well, let's get to you and your brother.
I mean, how many hours of your life, how many millions of dollars in legal fees did you have to?
I mean, everybody, Don Jr., that I served with in the first Trump White House paid some kind of price, whether it was billions of dollars by Dan Scavino, Mark Meadows, and Mike Flynn, or me going to prison.
It's just, it's crazy stuff.
And so I wrote the book, and you're in the dedication, and rightly so.
You were one of the few people who were allowed to see me.
They didn't dare keep you out.
Yeah, no, when I met your now sweetheart, the first time was actually in a federal prison down in South Florida.
I had to come visit my boy.
And you did.
You brought Brother Sergio along.
You know, what was funny about that, of course, is they wouldn't let you in the visitor's room because they squirreled us away in some place because you would have brought the house down there.
But there's all sorts of fun stories in the book about a really dark place, prison.
I mean, I did make the best of it.
There's a lot of stories in there about it.
And not only did I survive, I don't know if you had time to even look at the book, but while I was in there, I uncovered this $5 billion taxpayer scandal and actually on the outside now because I'm blessed to have been able to go to the White House and they're working with the Bureau of Prisons to fix all it.
So it's been quite a journey.
But look, the message of I went to prison so you won't have to is one that will resonate with you.
It's simply this.
If we don't hold these bastards accountable, they're just going to do it again.
And Comey is like the tip of the iceberg.
You know, it's Clapper, Brennan, Paige, Strzok.
It's Adam Schiff.
It's all the politicians who were wearing, were in their district attorney rose, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Jack Smith's way at the top of my list.
But there's a funny story here.
We've been getting a lot of whistleblower documents out of the FBI.
I don't know if you've been following this story, but Senator Chuck Grassley's been doing a really good job of getting it out.
And it turns out that the FBI agent who put me in handcuffs and leg irons in that famous circus arrest with my fiancé at Reagan National Airport, he has like two degrees of separation with me and your dad.
And follow me here.
We find out that this guy, Walter Giordina, guy who puts me in leg irons and handcuffs, he goes back to the original steel dossier in 2016.
Because of course he does.
Christopher Steele, manufactured, paid for by Hillary Clinton, fake dossier.
This guy was at the center of that.
He's the guy, Don, who said it was a real dossier, not a fake.
And then that said, in Motion Crossfire Hurricane, Giodino is part of that.
He was on the Mueller Report investigation and mysteriously, not so mysteriously, maybe, all the stuff on his laptop disappeared, right?
And then he went on.
It doesn't even stop there.
Was, I don't know if you ever heard of Crimson, Operation Crimson River, but that was the one where they accused your dad of getting money from the Egyptians for his campaign.
It was like looter.
Well, they did everything.
I remember in Russia, Russia, Russia with me, it was like 39 agents magically had their cell phones lost.
They lost, they just all lost them.
Like, like the same day, like they were under subpoena.
Like 39, like, I don't think I've ever lost my cell phone.
And I certainly don't know 39 people that are the only 39 people working on one given subject that could all lose their cell phones.
We can't share anything.
We all lost them magically.
They also had a trick, Don, is where if you logged in with an improper password like three times into your FBI equipment, I think it worked on the laptop too.
Everything got erased.
Right?
So, anyway, what's the point?
The point is that what my, I'm a microcosm of this vast conspiracy, a word I never use lightly, but it turns out when you see the arc of history, the arc of history through the lens of this Giordina,
we see, yeah, they were all these people, Comey, Clapper, Page, Strzz, Rosenstein, Schiff, they were involved in two things: an insurrection, which was an attempted overthrow of the government when your dad was in the oval, and election interference by trying to stop them from winning the 2016, 2020, 24 election.
So I went to prison, so you won't have to.
There's a story about that.
My appeal actually is ongoing.
If I lose that appeal, everybody in the White House, this White House, right, and every White House going forward will be subject to going to prison if they don't bow to the knee of partisan Congresses.
So, talk about that a little bit, Peter, because I mean, you literally made the decision to go to prison rather than comply with an illegitimate congressional demand.
Now that you've had sort of more time to reflect on it, how do you sum that all up?
I mean, you're talking about the threats for the future.
The other side is always talking about the biggest threat to democracy.
It seems like that if people are made to comply to nonsense and go against everything they believe, not have to follow the law.
I mean, that's a true threat to democracy.
Take a little history here.
Back in the 1780s, President George Washington goes before Congress and establishes what's called the doctrine of executive privilege.
Washington says to Congress, I can no more command you to come to the White House than you can command me to go to Capitol Hill.
And over time, the Supreme Court basically reinforced the importance of this doctrine in what's called the candor and confidentiality of presidential decision-making, which is to say that senior advisors like me must be shielded from this prime of Congress to protect the candor and confidentiality and therefore the effect of decision-making of the president.
That was like well established for like two centuries here until Joe Biden came along.
I mean, it was the policy of the Department of Justice itself that if I got a subpoena or if a guy like me got a subpoena, then I had absolute testimonial immunity.
It was my duty not to go.
And that's different from, say, Hunter Biden.
When he gets a subpoena, he's not a White House advisor.
There's no executive approach here.
He should have went.
Of course, he didn't go to prison.
But the point is that.
Maybe he was running the Auto Pen and therefore covered.
I'm not so sure that guy could even do that.
But so, look, here's the problem.
The way my case went down, everybody involved in my incarceration was a Democrat, judge, jury, executioner, Congress, Merrick Garland, on down, right?
But here's the problem: it's like whenever the opposing party controls the White House and the House of Representatives, and therefore the Justice Department, you run the risk of being able to put the other side in prison if they don't bow to your subpoenas.
So every White House advisor going forward will be subject to a prison term if they refuse to testify before Congress.
And that's obeying their oath of office.
So it's an untenable position to put people like me in.
That's what I was in.
I made the choice to stand up for principal.
I'm continuing that fight.
I think it's going to go all the way to the Supreme Court.
But the stakes are really high.
And I get back to the central lesson, Don, of I went to prison so you won't have to.
If we don't hold them accountable, they'll do it again and again and again.
And as early as 2026, I mean, can you imagine if Hakeem Jeffries is the speaker of the House?
I mean, it's going to be crazy town.
I remember in the first term, and I'm one of only three people, proud of this, who served with your father all four years that first term.
I remember we were cruising along beautifully, and then we lose the 2018 election, and Pelosi gets there.
And, you know, that was the seeds of my own imprisonment.
I didn't know it at the time.
But the next two years, it was like chaos.
It was impeachment, impeachment, hoax, hoax, hoax.
It's like the country deserves a whole lot better than that.
So we've got to stop that weaponization.
And so what we do is like we got to focus on the people who were responsible.
And I know the names of these people: it's James Comey, it's Brennan.
And by the way, I think Jim Jordan yesterday just asked for Brennan's investigation and indictment, but it's Clapper, it's the page instruct, you know, the old twins at the FBI, very bad, very pivotal.
They wind up with a payday from the Department of Justice rather than going to prison.
It's like crazy stuff.
Yeah, you'd love not to have to talk about this stuff, but like you also have to be playing the same game because they keep doing the same thing to us.
And then we get in there.
And like, I mean, just, hey, their rules, not ours, but we can't be playing t-ball while they're playing hardball.
It doesn't work.
I mean, I think you're the same as I am, Don.
If there's an Old Testament and a New Testament there and they ask you which one you want to abide by, you're an Old Testament guy.
And that's what I am.
It's like, and it's good economics in a way, because if you think about it, if you don't hold people accountable, it's the perverse incentive for them to do it again.
So I come at it from both the law and economics.
It's like, I want to rein these people in.
So, I mean, look, Merrick Garland, Matt Gray, at the Justice Department, the people who were involved in my incarceration, Matt Graves, the U.S. Attorney, Merrick Garland, the prosecutors, Elizabeth Loy, John Crabb, and then the judge himself.
I mean, you can't make this stuff up.
The judge, hey, you want to be a judge, Don?
Here's how you do it in Washington.
If you're a Democrat, you go bundle money, literally, campaign contributions for a Democratic presidential nominee.
And as soon as he gets elected, you get appointed to the bench.
That was my judge.
And then, of course, the jury, I mean, look, you know how jury pools are, right?
You draw from the voter pools.
Hey, listen, that's why they sued Trump in New York and Atlanta and DC.
And the only place that went nowhere was Florida, and they didn't want to do there, but they had no choice based on the way the jurisdiction works.
So, I mean, you know, they're clearly venue shopping, and so they understand.
And again, we've never played the game the way that they do, but you know, hey, they play it well and it's worked.
But, Peter, I'd ask, you know, for those who may not necessarily understand all of the legal nuances, what is the Supreme Court precedent here?
What are the other major constitutional issues here as it relates to executive privilege, et cetera?
That's a great question.
And the beauty of this is that my case is called a case of first impressions.
There literally has been no senior White House advisor ever charged with this crime and much less convicted and put in prison.
And the Supreme Court has weighed in the past on issues related to executive privilege.
It's always firmly supported it on the grounds that it protects the candor and confidentiality of presidential decision making.
There's a very famous dicta.
The only time executive privilege was qualified, it was done in a very limited way.
The text says cabin to criminal matters.
And the things I was involved with had nothing to do with criminal matters.
It was simply that I refused the subpoena.
So the Supreme Court, in the best possible world, says that senior White House advisors have absolute testimony immunity according to what had been 50 years of Department of Justice policy, that executive privilege is presumptive.
You know, there was some debate about how executive privilege was invoked in my case, which the judge, the Democrat judge, used to dick around and violate the constitutional separation of powers between the judiciary and the president.
So that needs to be settled.
And the third one is like every time this has happened before, there's been some kind of accommodation process.
Hey, look, I wouldn't even have.
We don't get those benefits, Vader.
Yeah, I would have been happy to testify.
I told him repeatedly, I said, just go to President Trump and ask him to waive the privilege.
They never ever did that.
So it's a big case.
And again, if I lose, then anybody who serves in the White House serving the president will run the risk at some point, either inside or out afterwards, going to prison if they don't go and spill their guts about very private and confidential, important conversations in the White House.
I mean, you can imagine all the negotiations with China or Russia or something like that.
All the options that advisors talk about, confidentiality, you don't want that out there.
I mean, that's what George Washington saw when he negotiated the Jay Treaty.
No, no, no.
You don't get to look under the hood there.
That's bad policy.
That's bad decision making.
So we'll see what happens, as your father is so fond of saying.
But in the meantime, try to fight the good fight on this.
And my oral arguments in the case actually are in December.
Here's how screwed up things are.
Okay.
Why would it take that long?
I mean, you've been out of jail for a year now.
Well, welcome to my world.
But here's what's interesting here.
Think about this.
It's like when I got convicted and sentenced, the normal course of events would have been to release me pending appeal.
That's the legal term of art.
Okay.
Let me have my appeal before you put me in the slammer because there's serious constitutional issues involved.
There's no question about that.
Okay.
Yet, the three-judge panel who ruled that I had to go to prison before my appeal was heard said there was no constitutional issues.
I mean, it's like absurd on his face.
Now, here's the punchline: the three-judge panel that I'm going to have oral arguments in front of, guess what?
Same people, Patricia Millette, Cornelia Pillard in particular.
So there's no random draw in this.
They just, it's like the appeals court at the district level in D.C. is a total cesspool.
They're sacking the deck.
And that's why I say this will eventually have to go to the Supreme Court.
And I just hope they'll take it up.
You never know.
That's always a crapshoot.
But it's a case of extreme importance constitutionally.
Again, let's see what happens.
So if I remember correctly, when I went down to visit you, I think you were the only person in that Miami federal penitentiary serving time for a misdemeanor.
Yeah, everyone else, you know, felons, you're in there for a misdemeanor.
Again, they wouldn't let you do, you know, hold off till the appeal process went through.
They just wanted you off the grid during an election cycle, I guess.
And, you know, what did your fellow inmates think about your situation?
And perhaps what surprised you most about the federal prison system from the inside?
Yeah, so I have two claims to fame down there.
I was the only guy with a misdemeanor among 200 felons.
And many of them, I mean, some of them were white-collar crimes, but a lot of them were gun-related drug stuff.
So this was not a no country for old men, right?
I was also.
Hey, I saw you down there, man.
You got pretty jacked in prison, though.
I mean, you had the time.
I was like, damn, Peter, you look ripped.
I may have to let the Democrats have their way with me.
Maybe not for too long, but a couple of months just to get jacked.
I was the only guy also who served the entire prison term.
Every single day they assigned to me, I had to serve.
Everybody else gets time off for good behavior, time off for this, time off for that.
It makes you all 120 days, including like two days before I was released to go to the convention, was my birthday, right?
So the experience itself is like, I was like Switzerland in there.
People, it was funny.
They respected me right as I got in there for kind of a funny way.
There's a story, and I went to prison so you won't have to, about how I get surrounded in the yard like two days in.
And it's like, I'm thinking, you know, what could go wrong here?
And they start bannering with these guys.
They're all like Puerto Rican guys.
And a little broken English going on that the guy says, I like you.
I said, why do you like me?
And he says, you're not a snitch.
And I'm thinking to myself, you know, it may have nothing to do with snitching, but take the win, Peter.
Constitution, right?
And, you know, not snitching on your fellow mate.
But that was Switzerland.
You know, it's like in prison, it's like it's very clique, right?
There's the gangs like the white-collar guys were white.
The Haitians had a lock on the kind of internet scam crime.
The Puerto Ricans were generally in for drug running, often with gun-related offenses.
And the Puerto Ricans wind up in U.S. prisons because there's no prisons in Puerto Rico because they're too corrupt down there to run them.
So I, you know, it's like Bobbin and Wing, but every day, I mean, look, what you have to do when you're in there is have a routine.
You have to be strong in who you are.
It was very hard to stay healthy.
I was in a joke with Bannon all the time.
Bannon tries to try to say he was in a better situation because he had a cell.
I love Bannon, but yeah, he did not lose the same weight that you lost in prison.
Unless it would have been a better meal plan.
And he got more sleep because if you've got like one cellmate you got to worry about with a closed cell door versus 50 in your dorm that you got to worry about, it's a different situation.
But you'd be in there.
It's like you'd hear a guy cough.
And, you know, like two weeks later, you're getting that.
Yeah.
Right.
And there's a funny story.
And I went to prison, so you won't have to.
It's the Twain thing.
It's like, see if I get this right.
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in a Miami prison.
Right.
I get in there like the first night, Don, and I get in and it's like it's like 58 degrees in the dorm, 58 degrees.
It's Miami in the middle of the summer.
And I'm going, what the hell is going on here?
And this is like this is like prison economics.
Like months ago, a lightning bolt had struck the electronics that guided the thermostats for the air conditioner.
So rather than spend like $100 to repair that, they spend like thousands every month just full bore.
So, you know, it was like crazy stuff.
Well, you do that.
I mean, in the book, I know you document sort of serious problems within the Bureau of Prisons.
I mean, that's, you know, that's kind of inefficiency.
But from health care failures to intentional delays and releases, you know, what were some of your major takeaways there?
And what have you done about it since then?
So that's the $5 billion scam that I uncovered in the first term, your dad signed into law this thing called the First Step Act.
And it was a response to was fairly dramatic over sentencing for the previous two decades.
Right.
So think about it this way.
You got nonviolent first time offenders primarily benefiting from the First Step Act.
And the idea is if they behave themselves, then they'll get out earlier based on time credits for basically learning new skills and doing some remedial work and things like that.
OK.
And so I get in there and the first thing I find out is I'm not getting my 30 days off for the first step back from the 120.
I'm going, what's that all about?
And I started to ask some questions and it turns out, Don, that that of the more than 50,000 inmates in the whole system, every one of them was not getting out when they should.
It was anywhere from three months to a year or more that they were being held over because the prison bureaucracy makes money off to keeping people in prison.
Now, what's the problem with that?
Well, first of all, after you punish somebody enough, if you keep them beyond that, they'll more likely recidivate because when you're in there.
You're in there, you're in there.
you'll lose all your skills.
You lose half your family and this kind of thing like that.
Plus, you have to pay more for these people in there.
And then if you've got like, if you get them to a halfway house when they should, then they're working and they pay taxes.
And then every Bonnie, come see down here.
I'm going to show you.
I got my girl here.
I'll show you.
She's going to say everything.
Every weekend, Bonnie would come visit me and we'd be with all the families, right?
Hey, great to see you.
For cameo appearance.
This is the cameo.
The families would be on food stamps and housing substances.
It's like, hey, you add it all up.
It's $5 billion.
So, what I've done since I came back in the administration, I'm working very closely.
We got a really good Bureau of Prisons director, a guy named Bill Marshall out of West Virginia.
He's got some, we helped get some good staff behind him.
Here's the funny thing.
Again, this is a vignette from I Went to Prison, so you won't have to.
There's a calculator that they used to get the credits, and that was what was screwing it up.
So I pledged in the book that I say I do two things: I get the calculator finally fixed, and then if there wasn't room in the halfway houses, people would go directly to home confinement.
So one of the first things I do is like I get the calculator fixed.
It turns out there was one guy, he was like the wizard of Oz.
His name's Andy Black.
He was like working with a 1950s IBM computer that knows no oblique cloud, none of that stuff.
And he was the one guy doing the calculations for every single person in the system, screwing it up royally.
So I got some, I got a group in.
We just like wiped that away.
We went right to the cloud, got that fixed, got the policy changed so that they go directly to home confinement.
We're still getting some resistance here.
And, but in a matter of months, it's going to be settled.
So it's all good, man.
And it's like it's pretty cool, Don, if you think about it.
I go to prison, like, okay, write my book, but actually, I'm able to write a book about solving a $5 billion problem after turning myself into an investigative reporter.
I mean, I know that doesn't happen.
So, is that what took up your time in prison all day?
Because I'm curious, like, what do you actually do in prison all day for months on end?
What else stands out to you?
Yeah, so I had discipline.
Obviously, as you said, I was ripped when I came out.
Part of it, I mean, I lost 12 pounds, but I didn't have a pound to lose.
That was not good.
But, you know, I'd go out to the yard.
They had this weird stuff.
Again, vignettes in the book.
It's like when you go out, you had to use dumbbells that were made out of mayonnaise jars filled with sand.
Okay.
You'd go out with these mayonnaise jars with sand, you do this kind of thing.
The reason why you did that is that the guards didn't want anybody to have dumbbells because they didn't want anybody to have any strength to give them any trouble, right?
So, were the mayonnaise jars made of glass or plastic?
Because I feel like plastic, okay?
Well, that makes a lot of sense.
I mean, they would last for a while, and then somebody dropped them in the cap would fall off.
You have to replace them.
But we had that.
They made cans.
There weren't any fresh vegetables.
I mean, for example, there's a little post that I went to prison, so you want to have to, but there's no oranges or grapefruit in a Miami prison.
Why?
Because they use them like for hooch.
So you get these like gallon tin cans of like peaches and crap filled with sugar, right?
So you use the empty cans and you get some cement from like the workshop that gets purloined and maybe a bar that would otherwise be used for a fence post.
And they turn those into dump to barbells, right?
So you go out and you do some workouts and stuff like that.
And they had a third of a mile track.
I did run in the Mad Dogs Englishman in Navarro, they say, go out in the noonday sun.
But I love it because I grew up in Florida.
So you do that.
And then you did my writing because there's 120 posts in, I call them posts in the book.
I went to prison so you won't have to, which are kind of my daily journals and the story unfolds that way.
You try to stay healthy.
It's very difficult.
And there's a story about, for example, how there was an SIS raid on the dorm where they completely threw all my belongings and mattresses all over the place because that particular unit wasn't representative of the guards themselves, but that particular unit didn't like Donald Trump.
So they were like harassing me that day, smashing shit.
So sometimes there were lockdowns.
So yeah, every day was every day, you know, there's a lot of danger there.
A lot of things that can go wrong.
So you got to watch your back.
But by the end, people really depended on me a lot of ways.
I mean, I did.
I actually saved the guy's life.
There's a story about that, you know, how I could use, I would take chances that these guys couldn't.
You know, if they went and gently demanded something from the guard, they'd wind up in Jacksonville the next day on a bus.
But there was this one guy, big, tall, strong guy who played a lot of ball.
He comes to me one night about six o'clock with an interpreter.
And this guy, grown man, is in tears.
And he looks about, I don't know, 10 months pregnant.
And it's like he just had tremendous pain in his stomach.
They gave him Tylenol.
They wouldn't call a hospital.
So I went to the guard, walked down the hall, went to the guard.
Guy looks at me.
I go, look, you got two choices here.
Either this guy is going to die on your watch, or you're going to call him an ambulance.
Make the choice.
We got him out of there in 20 minutes, and he had an operation for three hernias that night.
And there's a good chance he might not have survived another day if they hadn't done that.
So stuff like that.
But it's just a dangerous place.
I never played in any of the softball or basketball games, even though I was attempted because the first thing they tell you is, hey, if you get injured here, you're screwed.
So don't put yourself at that kind of risk.
So, you know, it was 120-day journey.
But at the end of the day, I think I'm not better off for it.
I think it probably shaved a few months or years off my life, but I think the world's going to be better off.
That's an interesting point.
I mean, your book's title suggests, you know, you went through this, so others won't have to.
It quite literally says that in the title.
What's your message to Americans who support President Trump, but worry they could be next if Democrats regain power?
Well, let's make sure we win elections.
I mean, you can never, ever again let your guard down in this country because these people are relentless.
They've proven they don't play by the rules.
They will do everything to skew our great Democrat system, Democratic system, their way.
And, you know, I mean, I think you and I would agree, and you and I are mad about this, that our side doesn't play as tough as they do.
And we need to learn how to do that.
I mean, certainly you and I do.
But look, the Hill, the Republicans on Capitol Hill didn't lift a friggin finger.
And they could have.
And they could have done a lot by now to hold people accountable.
So to the people, it's like, come on, this is a fight warning.
This is a fight.
It's a fight every day.
If you want to hold on to your way of life, you've got to fight for that way of life.
Get in the game.
Peter, now I got to ask you about trade because that's sort of what you specialized in.
You're the architect of a lot of the trade policy of the first administration still involved in now.
What is going on right now with the tariffs and China in particular and all of that?
What do we need to know?
Obviously, every day, sort of the markets get a little turbulent every time we even talk about it and stuff like that.
But you think we're close to some of these things?
So let's take the rest of the world over here and China here.
Your father has engineered a miracle.
It's something that I don't think anybody ever envisioned, which is to completely restructure an international trading environment, which is fundamentally and institutionally skewed against America.
By the very rules of the World Trade Organization, Don, other countries are allowed to charge us higher tariffs and have higher non-tariff barriers, and they all do.
And what your father has done with his reciprocal trade doctrine is wipe that off the charts.
And we've got most of the world now agreeing to tariffs that we put on them, tariff reductions on their end, and a whole host of reductions and non-tariff barriers by them.
At the same time, that we're going to be collecting an astonishing amount of money from the tariffs over the next 10 years, which will basically turn us from a debtor nation into one where we've got a chance of balancing our budget.
It's truly, truly, truly remarkable.
The problem looming on the horizon is, again, SCODIS, the Supreme Court.
There's a case there that if they uphold the Trump reciprocal tariffs, this country is going to be on Easy Street.
It's going to be great.
If they don't, we're going to be thrust back into the dark ages beforehand, and we're going to have to figure out what to do then.
But I'm very bullish on that.
We've got a few countries in the rest of the world we're still dealing with.
India is getting really close on India.
Your dad's getting ready to go to Southeast Asia.
I think we're going to sign a deal with Malaysia, for example.
But we've got Europe, Japan, Indonesia, Korea.
And they're all not only lowering their trade barriers, they're bringing investment here.
It's all good.
Now, China, China has revealed itself with this rare earth issue as a country which is using the weaponization of their manufacturing floor,
their supply chains, to exert pressure, not just on the United States, but to every other country that might do something that gets in the way of the Chinese dream of world domination by their 100-year birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, which is 2049.
And that's what we're fighting now.
We are in a good place with China with respect to defending ourselves.
We have tariffs a little over 50%, which is the way things should be because of all the crap they do to us.
But there's a dispute now over their intention to weaponize their supply chains to force us to stop defending ourselves, which is just unacceptable.
So no one knows how to negotiate better than your father.
It's a high-stakes poker game, but I think the markets certainly have confidence in your dad's ability to do that.
You know, the last thing I would say is that we've still got this fight on inflation.
It's the Biden inflation.
Tariffs have had no contribution to that.
We have to keep making that point because they keep saying it does and it doesn't.
It didn't in the first term.
It's not doing now.
But to the extent that Biden engaged in totally fiscally irresponsible behavior and the Federal Reserve accommodated that with easy monetary policy, they left us pretty much with a mess.
So that's going to be a topic for the midterm elections.
We're going to be working hard to keep prices coming down.
They're going to try to say it was our fault when it was theirs, but that's politics.
But your father has done more, and I guess it's nine months now, than presidents do in two terms.
I mean, it's extraordinary.
The pace this time, I was in the first time around.
It took us over a year to really get moving on the tariffs, and we're just hit the ground running.
Well, Peter, as always, thank you very much for what you're doing in there.
Thank you for what you've done to yourself and to your family standing up for us.
Guys, make sure to check out I Went to Prison So You Won't Have To by Senior Counsel for Trade, Peter Navarro.
He's just a great friend, a great patriot, a great American.
Peter, thanks very much.
I look forward to seeing you again soon, buddy.
Thanks, my brother, for being there in my hardest, hardest of times.
My back was against the wall.
You had my back, brother.
It's my honor, my friend.
Thank you.
You keep doing what you do, guys.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
Remember to like, to share, to subscribe.
It's so easy.
It's easy.
Just do it.
Check it out on Apple, Spotify Podcast.
If your friends get their podcast that way, even if you're a regular here, subscribe over there as well.
Share it with your friends if they're locked into those programs and those platforms.
Check us out.
Get it out there.
Don't forget to also look up our incredible sponsors down below and in the video description.
That's a big deal.
It's important.
You got to support those who are supporting you.
▲
Export Selection